If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.

If it’s taking to long to get up the career ladder, get a career lift.

Life is too short for anger, resentment, hostility and "should have." It is too short to put off doing what brings you joy. Live each day as if it were your last, because one day it will be.

His designs were strictly honourable as the phrase is: that is to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.

The goal isn't how much money you make, but how much you help people.

The only way you preserve pitching arms is throwing that makes the arm stronger.

[ Jonathan] Edwards is one of my heroes. I've learned much from him over the years.

I wanted to make people feel the same way I feel when I see a good movie.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.